ADDED: I see I already had a tag for Holdren. Back in 2009, he wrote: "A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States." I said "So... should we relax and enjoy the recession?"... which, in light of Holdren's newer nuttiness sounds more sexual than I think I intended at the time.

CORRECTION: I should say that back in 2009, I wrote about that passage, linking to an article about Holdren being asked about the quote, which he'd written back in 1973. I can see that the item I picked up today is from the same site CNS news that I'd linked to in '09. (And that the link had gone dead. I've replaced it with a similar link from 2010.)

Clicking around at CNS, I see that old book also said: "The fetus, given the opportunity to develop properly before birth, and given the essential early socializing experiences and sufficient nourishing food during the crucial early years after birth, will ultimately develop into a human being."

You must put scary pictures on cigarettes you must not use sexy images to promote automobiles. Experts on imagery and thought-desire manipulation, that's just plain good solid governance.

I didn't vote for him but he's turning out great. I want four more years of this, Czars all over the place doing all kinds of splendid and wonderful things and just bypassing that whole silly two house congress thing. Boom. Gone. Just like that. No more of that greatest deliberative body in the world crap LOL now finally we can really get things done around here.

Really, Ann? You are dredging up a 40 year old book? Do you believe everything YOU wrote 40 years ago? Not that Holdren even believes this, he uses the word "COULD." Do you know what that word means, mendacious one?

You tag this as "Obama environmental policies," which is an outright lie. Where does Obama endorse this? And what's the context of this? Was he talking about his views or someone else's or a possible turn of events or what? (You probably don't know and have no regard for the accuracy of your "nutty" attacks).

AlphaLiberal said...Really, Ann? You are dredging up a 40 year old book? Do you believe everything YOU wrote 40 years ago? Not that Holdren even believes this, he uses the word "COULD." Do you know what that word means, mendacious one?

A lesson on mendacity from AlphaLiberal!

Forth the record, I do believe that people can still believe what they wrote and said 40 years ago. Case in point: Bill Ayers.

I want to see a Dodge Ram commercial in which a 30-second montage of pistons firing slowly through cylinders is paired with a soundtrack of eight women having orgasms.

And, honestly, I think car commercials directed toward women should be of more concern to the writers of that book. Those commercials show how easy and fun it can be to corral and manage a large litter of carbon-spewing children. Remember the Volkswagen Routan campaign with a bunch of women running out to get pregnant so they'd have an excuse to buy that minivan?

The Fiat 500/Jennifer Lopez commercial was the antidote to that, and was probably EPA-approved. "See, dumb women? Who needs children and minivans when you can be single, childless, attractive, and the center of attention?"

It's amusing that commercials for men play off how men want to see themselves while commercials for women play off how women want others to see them.

And concerning Alpha Liberal's point that the ideas discussed in this book are 40 years old: That's considered fresh by modern liberal standards. The Left hasn't had a new idea since Medicare--and look how well that's going.

First, maybe he missed it but Paul Ehrlich was a pretty big deal back in the day. Publishing a book with him is not something that one is likely to forget.

Second, when you take the time to publish a book, you own the views in that book. Unless you can show me where Holden ever repudiated these views, we can only assume he still holds them.

Third, there is nothing out of context about these quotes. Anyone who is even remotely familiar with Ehrlich and 1970s Neo Malthusian thinking knows the quotes are exactly what was being pushed back then. So stop with the taken out of context BS you dishonest little turd.

Third, some statements are nasty and vile that they really do haunt you for the rest of your life. These quotes talk about destroying the American way of life and creating an authoritarian state to forcibly control population. If he were from the right and were found to be supporting segregation in 1973, you would not be as forgiving.

@chip s: well, "classic 911" can mean different things to different people. to me, it means what is called a short hood 911, which are the pre-1974 cars. my car is an 84 carrera targa which i've had for 18 years now.

the first new car i ever owned was an 81 vw jetta, which luxuriated in an awesome 75 or so horsepower from its 1.7 liter 4 cylinder engine.

by contrast, my 911, with its 207 horsepower, is an absolute rocket.

today however, things are a little different. my 911 is still faster, as defined by top speed, than most cars by a fair margin. as far as acceleration goes however, while my 911 is still usually quicker than pickup trucks and minivans, there is not a lot of difference in some cases.

the newer 911s are so quick as to be ridiculous. driving my car at anything close to the vehicle's potential will rightly land you in jail. half throttle applied for any length of time in a newer 911 will result in speeds approaching triple digits.

if i were to get another 911 (my 84 will be part of my estate) i'd want one from 69 through 74 at the latest. now if i could just scrape together 30K or so, i'd start looking.

We are living in a golden age of automotive performance. My baby Mercedez Benz would leave all but the fastest muscle cars and sports cars of the 1970s for dead on the track. A mid 80s Ferrari super car was lucky to break six seconds from zero to sixty. I could buy a Golf GTI and eat a mid 80s 308 for lunch. It is just amazing how fast even affordable cars are these days.

And if you are going for 35K, why not go for an old 356? You can pick one of those up for around 30 to 40. And the real old school Porsche people tell me that four cylinder air cooled is the only real Porsche.

If we took the Commerce Clause seriously as a very limited grant of power to Congress to regulate the actual transfer of goods between the states with the goal of preventing trade wars, we'd be much better off.

What's amazing about these 40 year old quotes is how closely they still track to current progressive cant. The fetus quote is particularly chilling in light of today's "post-birth abortion." So I'm not so sure that our hostess should be pilloried for bringing them up AL. However, the truly telling thing is that none of the doomsday scenarios that were so confidently predicted by this '70s bunch have come to pass. Food for thought when contemplating our current crop of alarmists.

Scratch a liberal and their totalitarian yearnings come flying out like killer bees. Still, there is nothing wrong with yearning for a small world population. It's too bad most liberal politicians would rather bite off their toes than talk about the dangers of overpopulation.

Al Gore did a whole movie (An Inconvenient Truth) about the dangers of global warming without mentioning over-population even once. I know why too. They're scared to death someone will accuse them of hating illegal immigrants.

Gosh, you're right, AlphaLiberal. We have no way of knowing the full context of his words. Maybe Holdren was criticizing this notion, lampooning it as lunacy. If only we had some sort of way of finding strings of text on the internet, some sort of "engine" that would allow us to search them out.

"Advertising now functions in large part to keep the economy growing by creating demand for a wide variety of often useless, dangerous or environmentally destructive products. Its most dangerous abuses might be halted immediately by legislative action. For instance, it could be made illegal for any utility to advertise in such a way as to promote greater demand for power. Also, references to size, power or sexual potency (direct or implied) could be banned from automobile advertising."

Huh. Looks to me as though Holdren is suggesting this as a policy. That's weird. You know what? I bet this was planted into Holdren's text. Probably by the Jews, I'd guess. Or the Bilderbergers. Or Jewish Bilderbergers.

Leftards write themselves. They are truly truly dangerous people. How can anyone defend the utter attack on liberty, freedom, and prosperity in this way. I've been hammering how dangerous these people are and yet nothing is done. Their ideas are nihilistic in nature. Their goals are tyrannical in execution. Why are we entertaining any of this? It's anathema to the founding of this country. Even Thomas Paine is double epic facepalming at this.

John: The Fiat 500 is oddly compelling. The top end one has a turbo charged 165 horsepower engine. It must be like driving a go cart."

My dad won a (used) Fiat 500 in a sportman's bar in 1963, which, as I was a college student, he promptly gave to me. It didn't have much in the way of an engine (top speed was 67 mph) but it compensated with such great mileage (50 mpg) that I could drive from Pittsburgh, PA, to New York city for $2.65 in that car. Two bucks went for eight gallons of gas (25 cents per gallon). I spent another 15 cents for the bridge at Easton, PA, and 50 cents for the George Washington Bridge.

It's impossible to get even a hint of what an individual human being might think today based only on words he deliberated over, wrote down, and had published thirty nine years ago.

On the other hand, we can be absolutely certain we know what the temperature of the entire surface of the earth will be fifty or 100 years from now, so it turns out we need to eliminate attractive cars anyway.

"Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control."

Yeah, that was the quotation from your first link that stood out for me, too. I mean, let's untangle the strands here:

(1) He's interested in "involuntary fertility control."

(2) He's been sussing out which varieties of "involuntary fertility control" people find nastier vs. less nasty.

(3) He discovers that the one where the government slips "sterilants" into your drinking water, for some reason, weirds people out even more than does the one where you're forcibly implanted with subdermal hormone dispensers.

Thinking like this makes the fluoridation paranoids of the 50s sound strangely sane. (I would not be surprised if that's where the idea came from, at that.)

No one who has ever thought like this should be allowed anywhere near political power absent a complete recantation. No one.